Modern American Memoirs

The best writers tell true stories that fascinate not because they are true but because they are good stories. The people in them spring to life: James McConkey's stump-armed landlord in Court of Memory, Maxine Hong Kingston's hilarious aunt in The Woman Warrior, Geoffrey Wolff's scoundrel father in The Duke of Deception. Their events are vivid: Harry Crews, playing as a boy, falls into a vat of boiling water with a dead hog. Ralph Ellison visits a tenement to circulate a petition and finds four coal-shovelers discussing grand opera. Chris Offutt joins a circus as a walrus and watches a tattooed woman swallow a fluorescent light. Zora Neale Hurston, doing anthropological fieldwork, runs afoul of a knife-toting jealous woman in a Florida juke joint. Their worlds differ: Maureen Howard practices elocution; Frank Conroy practices yo-yo tricks. A young Navajo herder meets a woman on an Arizona hilltop; young Cynthia Ozick stockpiles issues of The Writer magazine in her closet in the Bronx. Sixteen-year-old Don Asher plays the piano for strippers called the Glamazons; statesman Henry Adams in his sixties plays with magnets on his desk.